Russian Possessive Pronouns

Possessive pronouns are words used in place of a noun or another pronoun which indicate ownership (in English, these are pronouns "my", "your", "his", "her" etc.). In Russian, these pronouns reflect all three persons, i.e. each personal pronoun has a related possessive pronoun:

Personal pronoun

Possessive pronoun

я

мой

ты

твой

он

его

она

её

оно

его

мы

наш

вы

ваш

они

их

Russian possessive pronouns are modifiers, they agree in gender, number, and case with the modified noun, and they are also referred to as possessive pronominal adjectives since their behavior in a phrase or sentence is similar to adjectives.

Unlike the English pronoun "my", the Russian pronoun мой changes its form depending on gender or number of the modified noun.

There is also a particular pronoun свой in Russian, called reflexive possessive pronoun, that means one's own and reflects ownership to subject of the verb in a phrase. This pronoun can be used only if the possessor and the subject are in the same phrase. Generally, the reflexive possessive pronoun can replace any possessive pronoun, but it is specially required if the subject of the verb is one of the third person personal pronouns он, она, они.

In this case, it is preferably to use the pronoun свой, since in Russian the pronoun его could be interpreted in some situations not only as his own dog, but also as someone else's dog.

The reflexive possessive pronoun rarely modifies nouns in the nominative form. It may be used with nouns in nominative in the construction with Russian preposition у meaning to have, such as У меня естьI have, where it stands for "one's own and not somebody else's", and also in several Russian proverbs and idiomatic expressions.

As mentioned above, Russian possessive pronouns agree in case with nouns, i.e. they also decline. However, the third person possessives are formally invariable and identical to the genitive form of the third person personal pronouns. Other possessive pronouns change according to gender, case and number of the noun. Notice that they reflect the animacy of the modified nouns and obey the declension rule of animate/inanimate referents in the accusative forms.